A commonly known method of manufacturing electrical harnesses is to feed wires for the harnesses from a plurality of wire sources, such as reels or barrels, through a clamping zone and after completion of the feeding step, clamping the wires in side-by-side parallel relationship in an array. The wires are then cut at a location close to the zone in which they are clamped and the array of wires is then moved laterally of the axes of the wires and presented to a processing machine. The processing machine may, for example, be an insulation stripping machine or it may be a machine for inserting all of the wires simultaneously into the terminals in a multicontact electrical connector. Both ends of the wires fed from the sources can be similarly treated so that a harness can be produced having a multicontact electrical connector at each end thereof.
The method of manufacturing harnesses as described above requires processing machines (insulation stripping machines or connector applying machines) which are capable of being used under circumstances where the ends of the wires are in alignment with each other and the individual wires are relatively close to each other. This known method can thus be used to simultaneously insert all of the wires into the terminals in a multicontact electrical connector in the known manner. However, it is not usually practical to crimp discrete terminals onto the ends of the wires. If a harness is required which has different types of discrete terminals on the ends of the wires, each terminal must be crimped onto the wire in a separate crimping operation and it is necessary to have a certain amount of clearance around the wire in order to provide room for the crimping dye and anvil. Thus, an array of closely spaced wires cannot be presented to such a crimping press or other processing machine.
The present invention is directed to the achievement of an improved method which permits the crimping of discrete terminals onto the ends of the individual wires in the array.